Remembrance and Pantomime (2 page)

PILGRIM

     Good night, A.P.

(
He begins to exit. Then calls out
)

     See you Sunday.

JORDAN

     “Once they had parted, Padmore stood under the reeling stars and, in a voice whose power ignited the windows of Belmont and the wrath of his wife, announced to the sleeping world:

(
Roars
)

     Mabel!

     Maybelle?

     I

     am

     home!”

(
Plunges drunk into darkness
)

(
Blackout
)

SCENE 1

JORDAN

     Mabel? Mabel? I’m home.

(
He flings his hat toward the coat rack, misses, retrieves, wears it
)

MABEL

(
Offstage
)

     Is only now you come, you bitch?

JORDAN

     His wife replied. Charming! Padmore sneered. I should have stayed. I’m hungry.

MABEL

(
Enters, in nightdress, dressing gown, hat, and boots
)

     Why you ain’t ask Ezra Pilgrim to cook for you? Think I didn’t hear all you out in the street? Don’t bother ravage the fridge, it empty. Your son is home. Half past three, and you expect me to cook? Why you ain’t go and live by Ezra Pilgrim?

JORDAN

     Well, I thought since you were up. Where you going? Padmore solicitously inquired.

MABEL

     I going shopping, all right?

(
Pauses. Returns
)

     And, Albert, you bound to keep your hat on in the house? You going to sleep so?

JORDAN

     Padmore knew very well that he had been losing my hair.

MABEL

     A hat on in the house is a bad-luck sign. Take it off, please.

JORDAN

     Mrs. Padmore, when there is something or someone in the immediate vicinity I can take off my hat to, I shall. Till then …

MABEL

     I warn you. If you come to bed like that, Albert, I sleeping in my shoes. And you can also inform Padmore.

JORDAN

     Mabel! Mabel! Suppose a car knock you down dressed like that? Padmore felt a joyful fear.

(
MABEL
exits.
FREDERICK
,
unnoticed, enters in pajamas
)

     Thirty-odd years of total misunderstanding.

FREDERICK

     What’s up now, Pop?

JORDAN

     Frederick, you’re a grown man; how old are you now, thirty-one, thirty-two? People mistake you for a younger brother on those rare occasions when we are together. Now you emerge from your kiddie’s room in the early hours like a kid asking for a glass of milk and a cookie, and crown it all by calling me Pop. No, wait, wait … Frederick, I am Albert Perez Jordan, retired schoolteacher, coasting round sixty-five years, I am bored and fed up. I am particularly fed up with you, Freddie. Fred up with Freddie. Go back to sleep.

FREDERICK

     Gee, Pa …

JORDAN

     Frederick, Frederick, Frederick, Frederick, Frederick, “Gee, Pa” is only a little worse than “What’s up, Pop?” We are in Trinidad. Normal idiots might venture such exchanges as “Wha’ happening, Daddy?” or “What it is Mammy do you?” but I guess it’s because you’re an artist. Did you paint today?

FREDERICK

     Yes, Pappy. Good night.

JORDAN

     Come here, son. And kiss your father good night. Don’t be afraid.

FREDERICK

     It’s not fear. It’s the after-odor of liquor that makes me upset.

JORDAN

     
Kiss your father, boy!
There, that didn’t hurt, did it? Sit down till your mom, your gee-whiz mom, comes back from riding her tantrum and tell me what you painted, or even better, bring it, that I may proffer a layman’s judgment.

FREDERICK

     I can’t, Pop. I mean, “Ah cyant bring it, Pappy.”

JORDAN

     God, if there’s one thing I rue, my boy, is the day I taught my children diction. I think I did it to defy your mother’s earthy vulgarity. Diction has made you a misfit, Frederick, an anachronism in these days of independence. I miss colonialism. Why can’t you bring the painting to Papa, Fred my boy?

FREDERICK

     It’s on a wall. Is … It’s a … Is a mural.

JORDAN

     I know what a mural is. Which wall?

FREDERICK

     You ent go get vex?

JORDAN

     How can art get anyone vexed? You’re home on a fellowship, Fred, a grant from the Albert Perez Jordan Foundation, I am your sponsor, why should I discourage you from painting the side of the house—that’s-not-where-you-painted-the-damned-thing, is it?

FREDERICK

     No. It’s on the roof.

JORDAN

     A roof mural! Good! I suppose it’s meant for passing planes? Don’t you think, dear boy, that it may be a danger to aerial navigation?

FREDERICK

     I have a flashlight. You want to come and see it?

JORDAN

     I understand, Freddie dear, that in the Vatican the visitors lie on their backs to achieve a layman’s view of Michelangelo’s brush; why wouldn’t I accompany you to the roof of our little suburban mansion? Let us proceed. I hope you’ve signed it?

(
Exit
FREDERICK
and
JORDAN
as
MABEL
enters with a small brown paper bag, quarreling, expecting
JORDAN
to be on his usual roost, the couch. She closes the door
)

MABEL

     Well, I’m telling you it take all my Christian fortitude to go into Harry’s All-Night Bar and Grill at four in the morning. I have to stand up in my alpagartas listening to Harry tell me about his boxing career, cooking with his hat on, asking me in front of all them rum drinkers and street cleaners, “How’s the professor, Mrs. J.?” I don’t call people Mr. H. or Mr. R. I was a teacher, too, and I respect the alphabet.

(
Crosses into the living room, removes her hat and dressing gown, talking over her shoulder to the empty couch. Crosses to the kitchen
)

     Shame have you silent, nuh?

(
Crosses to the empty couch
)

     You hearing me? Where this man evaporate? Albert. Where the hell he gone?

(
Noise overhead. She listens
)

JORDAN

     Could you come up here a second, Mabel? I think our boy Freddie’s done a masterpiece.

MABEL

(
Looking up
)

     Albert! Somebody walking on the blasted roof.

JORDAN

     It is I, it is us. It is we. I’m looking at Freddie’s work. In my layman’s view, and at night by a torch, I pronounce it the greatest thing since Picasso.

MABEL

(
Shouting
)

     So is that Freddie was doing up there all day, when he tell me for the last two days that he repairing the leak?

FREDERICK

     I meant to patch the leak, Mother, but I got carried away.

JORDAN

     Are you coming up, Mabel?

MABEL

     No, I ent coming up, not with my arthritis, and the hops and shark getting cold. I go buy a plane ticket and check it out in the morning. On my way to Tobago. No.

(
Talking to herself now
)

     Not Tobago, either. My sister Inez tired begging me to leave that damned jackanapes and come meet her in Brooklyn.

(
Loudly again
)

     
So tell Frederick Mammy will see it on the way to the States.

(
Enter
JORDAN
and
FREDERICK
,
exultant
)

JORDAN

     Stop the presses, call the newspaper, summon the critics, my faith in the boy is justified. Frederick, your son, has created a masterpiece, from what I could see! I take off my hat to you, son! I hurl it from me in the ultimate bravo! Hip hip, hip hip,
hip-hip horray!

(
Hurls his hat away
)

     Mabel! Mabel! Do you know what our boy Frederick has done?

MABEL

     Eat your hops and shark. Go back to sleep, Freddie. Your father so bored with retirement he ent know what to do.

JORDAN

     Only one hops and shark you buy?

MABEL

     How I was to know two of you all would be up on the roof in the middle of the night, with all Belmont sleeping, not to buy one shark and hops?

JORDAN

     You hungry, boy?

FREDERICK

     If!

JORDAN

     Sacrifice, sacrifice, there’s no reward without sacrifice. Give the child the sandwich. I’m so excited. My advice to you, Freddie, is to keep that roof nailed down securely. Don’t leave the house without checking it’s there, and that goes for you, too, Mabel. People are stripping cars in seconds, stealing entire buses; save part of that shark for me, boy, and the thing will be gone. Thank you.

(
Accepts a bit of shark and bread
)

     Harry knows I like pepper. Know what our boy has done, mistress? He has, following the ripples of the galvanized roof, painted what appears to me to be a large American flag. The ripples being the stripes and the holes the stars. It’s a tribute to Uncle Sam. I wish my brother, my twin brother, your twin uncle, Frederick, would come down to see it. Frederick, you have exalted our house. Cheers. I forgive you.

(
Pause. Roars
)

     Boy! You had nothing better to do than to spend the whole damned day on top the blasted house making me a laughing-stock again? And now you compound my embarrassment with that idiotic doodle. An idiotic Yankee Doodle? And then you turn around and calmly consume the one hops and shark that your poor mother goes out into the howling wind and pelting rain to fetch?

MABEL

     It ent raining, there ain’t no wind, and I didn’t mind.

JORDAN

(
To
MABEL
)

     My mother said it when I married you—I burned out my talent in domesticity. I have wasted my life. I am going to bed.

(
Exit. Then pause. Returns
)

     Buy ten gallons of turpentine and wash out that shit on the roof tomorrow. And find a
job!

(
Exit, with hat
)

MABEL

     Don’t mind him, Freddie. These days, your father …

(
JORDAN
returns without hat
)

JORDAN

     I’m sorry, boy. I know what you painted. A symbol of distress.
Help us, America!
A cry from the Third World. Is that right, Frederick?

FREDERICK

     Is just a flag on the roof, Pa.

JORDAN

     Well, it so happens that it’s my roof and it’s the American flag.

FREDERICK

     You want me to make it the Union Jack?

JORDAN

     Bravo! It would at least be a monument to your father’s values! It would be something that he could look up to. Today, art! Tomorrow, turpentine!

(
Exit
)

FREDERICK

     You right. I’m worried about him, too.

(
JORDAN
returns, in singlet and underwear, wearing hat
)

JORDAN

     Furthermore, suppose they take this place for the American Embassy and bomb it?

(
Exit
)

MABEL

(
Picks at a crumb
)

     I give up hoping long ago that fool would change. When we was courting, he used to stroll with me by a place where a old coolie named Suraj used to keep ducks. The damn place splattered with duck shit, but he would hold his nose high, and as he throw crumbs to the ducks in that stinking canal, he would say, “We are feeding the swans of Avon.” British from the first to the last crumb. Drunken fool. He thinks is only he who could talk English? I was a teacher, too.

FREDERICK

     I know, I know, Ma.

MABEL

     Primary school is true. But a teacher all the same. And a plain downright Trinidadian from Arima.

FREDERICK

     Dad’s got to stop dreaming.

MABEL

     Dad’s got to stop dreaming. You want to kill Dad? Between him and Ezra Pilgrim on Tuesday nights, they does spend sufficient to pay back the mortgage. But he is convinced that some sweepstake ticket out there looking for him.

(
Rises
)

     Frederick, why you paint the man roof?

(
Pause
)

     You was bound to paint God Bless America straight on top his head?

FREDERICK

     I am a painter, Ma.

MABEL

     Excuse me, I thought you was an artist. But since you turn house painter, you could earn some money. The whole of Port of Spain could do with a second coat. Lord, look, is morning! Go and see how that flag look by the dawn’s early light; then wipe it off, Freddie, before the man get a fit.

FREDERICK

     Well, he taught me one thing, Ma: never sell out.

(
BARRLEY
enters the veranda
)

MABEL

     Freddie, don’t be like your father, please. Who would want a galvanize flag?